Press TV
has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, author and Middle East
expert, from Madison, to discuss Human Rights Watch (HRW) recent report
over Takfiri militants killing 190 civilians and holding over 200 others
hostage in Syria’s western province of Latakia in August alone.
What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Reports have poured in, regarding the
rights abuses being committed by these Takfiri insurgents for a while
now and now we have these documented evidence being presented by the
Human Rights Watch.

How does one even begin to justify this reality on the ground in Syria?

Barrett: Well, you cannot justify it; this whole war
in Syria never should have happened. And indeed the government in Syria
bears some of the blame, because it reacted in some ways … in a very
ill-thought-out way to the demonstrations that set this all off.

But I think that was a trap; it was actually set by the people who
are currently arming the insurgents and sending them on these missions
of death and destruction. It was a trap for the Syrian people because
what they really wanted to do …let’s name names and say who it was. It
was the Israelis and the Saudis who have done essentially the same
things now; they have been virtually merging into one country of
Saudi-Israelia, And the hard-line faction of neo-conservatives here in
the US that want to destroy Syria for Israel, turn it into three small
balkanized little states and go through Syria in an attack on Iran; that
was the grand strategy.

So, it is not at all surprising that these mercenaries, extremists,
takfiris and some honestly misguided people who have been led to wage
war on Syria and the Syrian government have been committing these kinds
of atrocities.

This maybe the first one that Human Rights Watch calls fully
documented, but there are dozens and dozens of other similar events that
are pretty well-documented by various kinds of media; and in fact, even
the August attack was quite obviously a false flag by Bandar Bush and
his Saudi intelligence terrorists. This has been exposed by everybody
from an AP correspondent to a number of other people on the ground in
Syria.

So, it does seem that so-called insurgents are committing at least
their share, and it looks like a lot more than their share, of the
atrocities in Syria. And yet the Western media is completely ignoring
all of the violence and carnage that is being waged by the people that
the Western governments are actually arming and supplying.

In fact, the Western governments here are allying themselves with
al-Qaeda. They are complicit in the murder of ambassador [Christopher
Stevens] in Libya, well over a year ago. He was involved in an operation
to transfer arms from al-Qaeda linked extremists in Syria to other
American backed al-Qaeda extremists, I am sorry, from Libya to Syria.

So, all kinds of terrible blowback is coming out of this; it was a
terrible mistake by everyone involved to create a Syrian civil war. The
only party that is really going to benefit from this is the Israelis who
have managed to smash a large and coherent country on the borders they
are occupying. Now the Israelis are never going to have to worry about
giving back the Golan Heights of Syria, it is fully destroyed. That is
the end game of this Syrian civil war.

Press TV: Mr. Barrett, jump in if you may; Mr.
[Anjem] Choudary [the other guest of the program] is questioning the
validity of this entire report to begin with. How would you respond to
this? What benefit does [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad get from
killing 190 civilians and holding 200 hostage?

Barrett: Right, I do not really understand Mr.
Choudary’s claim that the Western media and groups like Human Rights
Watch are somehow biased against the so-called Syrian rebels.
I think any objective analysis of how the Western media has been
covering the Syrian conflict will show that the Western media, the
people who own it, the big power brokers and the Zionists, who actually
are the people who have the majority share of the Western media, have
been bending over backwards to beat the drums of propaganda for the very
Syrian rebels that Mr. Choudary supports.
I think he should ask himself why that is. I mean, I do not know if
he is living in a bubble and not reading any of these newspapers and not
looking at any of these reports, not listening to speeches of people
like [US President Barack] Obama who is even itching to go , bomb Syria
on behalf of these rebels that Mr. Choudary supports.

But it is pretty ludicrous to try to claim that Human Rights Watch
and these Western institutions are somehow huge fans of President Assad
and enemies of the Syrian resistance. In fact, everybody in the world,
except Mr. Choudary I think, knows that the opposite is the case.

So, I think that Mr. Choudary has managed to sort of wall himself up
in some kind of information bubble, where he does not see what is
actually going on in the world and on the ground. Instead he is
intoxicated with all of this sort of radical jihadist, Islamist
rhetoric. And he has managed to do his own cause a lot of damage by not
recognizing what is really happening in the world and specifically in
Syria.

It is very clear that the Islamist political movements around the
world are managing to survive and thrive despite the war on Islam and
especially political Islam that was launched by that 9/11 false-flag
attacks.

But this is no thanks to people like Mr. Choudary, who failed to make
a distinction between legitimate, rational, reality based Islamic
political movements such as for the most part, the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt, the Islamic movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah,
Hamas and even elements of the Islamic resistance in places like
Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.
There is legitimate Islamic resistance in much of the world; most of
it is focused on peaceful democratic activism; occasionally, there is
legitimate Islamic armed resistance as Hezbollah and Hamas against the
Israelis; but to back these Takfiri lunatics who want to cut the head
off of everyone who does not accept their extremely narrow-minded
bigoted and obscurantist interpretation of Islam is a terrible crime
against the real Islamic political movements around the world.

So, I really would ask Mr. Choudary to step out of his bubble, take a
look at what is really happening and stop discrediting his own
movement.

Press TV: Mr. Choudary mentioned the Jabhat al-Nusra
or al-Nusra Front as commonly known, saying that they are protecting
the Muslim cause and fighting against Israel. what have these Takfiri
groups in Syria done up until now against Israel?

Barrett:
Well, of course they have done nothing against Israel. Al-Qaeda
itself is a very loosely organized ideological movement, not a real
organization…but there is still no evidence that al-Qaeda has ever even
tried to attack Israel or Israeli assets. Rather it has gone around
attacking its fellow Muslims primarily and then doing incredibly stupid
things like allowing the Zionists and the US National Security State to
frame it for supposedly conducting the 9/11 attacks which were an
obvious inside job.

Yet these so-called al-Qaeda people are so incredibly stupid that
they do not even recognize it and then they run around, trying to claim
credit for it, thereby completely destroying political Islam around the
world, making us look like idiots.

It is really sad and I would like to correct him: I agree with him
that Khalifa would be a good thing and I agree with him that sovereignty
belongs to God, I am in full support of the Islamic Renaissance around
the world, but I do not think that it is going to succeed when these
Takfiri groups who are extremely narrow-minded sectarian, are supported
by the world’s biggest degenerate criminals in Saudi Arabia, running
around killing the people that do not agree with them, running around
slaughtering people of ethnic groups or Islamic groups that they do not
agree with.

These people are not going to establish Khalifa, they are going to
establish Khalifa in their own minds as they do damage to the larger
cause. To be a Muslim is really about working for truth and justice and
this applies to everyone; you need to work for truth and justice for
everyone to protect people….(of all religions and ethnicities)…

Press TV: If these allegations are proven and it as
documented evidence will it go any further from the UN Security Council,
maybe to the ICC [International Criminal Court], very quickly?

Barrett: I doubt it; unfortunately I think Mr. Anjem
is wrong, I think the Western institutions are still supporting war
against the Syrian government, hoping to destabilize Syria, I do not
think they want actually look into Human Rights abuses by the Takfiri
groups that undercut their case for war on Syria; but I hope I am wrong.

We have seen a few signs of movement on the part of the Obama
administration recently. They did refuse to bomb Syria under [Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s orders. So, who knows? Maybe the
policy will be shifting in the right direction, God willing.